What is Business Process Reengineering (BPR)?

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is the radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in performance—such as cost, quality, service, and speed. Instead of making small adjustments to an existing workflow, BPR challenges the current way of working and rebuilds it around better outcomes.

BPR is often associated with Michael Hammer and the idea that organizations should rethink processes end-to-end rather than optimize isolated tasks. In practice, this means stepping back and asking fundamental questions: Why do we do this process at all? What outcome should it deliver? Which steps, approvals, or handoffs are no longer necessary? The goal is not just efficiency, but a different and better operating model.

Where process optimization focuses on continuous, incremental improvement, BPR is used when incremental changes are not enough. This may happen during major digital transformation, rapid growth, mergers, regulatory shifts, or when customer expectations have changed significantly. In these situations, organizations may need to redesign roles, decision rights, systems, and workflows at the same time.

Typical BPR principles include organizing work around outcomes instead of individual tasks, reducing unnecessary handoffs, capturing information once at the source, linking parallel activities earlier, and empowering the people closest to the work to make decisions. These principles help teams remove delays, improve quality, and create faster, more coherent processes across departments.

BPR can deliver major results, but it also carries higher risk than incremental improvement. Successful reengineering usually requires strong leadership, clear scope, cross-functional collaboration, and careful change management so people understand both the reason for change and the new way of working.

If you want a practical overview of improvement methods—including when to optimize incrementally and when a bigger redesign is needed—read our full guide to process improvement.